


Tell Myself It’s A New Day (Until It’s True)

by ShadowsLament



Category: Bodyguard (TV 2018)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-14
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-09-18 08:06:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16991199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowsLament/pseuds/ShadowsLament
Summary: After the bombing, and after seeing Julia in sundry spots, David attempts to get a handle on what’s happening to him. He goes to Rayburn, asks her to help him find proof of life or death, anything that might make sense of being followed by a woman with scars to match his own.





	Tell Myself It’s A New Day (Until It’s True)

“You ever wonder if it’s real?”

The window several meters ahead served as something more inline with a painting of the scene at David’s back. A not so still life dotted with transplanted saplings straitjacketed in narrow ropes; with quick-moving pedestrians coated in wool and leather, holding the hands of children or with a dog’s lead looped around the wrist. More than one opted to keep their spatial awareness confined to an area easily measured by the span of an arm, their attention pinned to phones, the odd folded newspaper, the contents of a handbag or pocket.

“If what is?”

A girl with long legs and dark hair curling in at the hinge of her jaw stopped to tug and tug on the straps of a small lavender rucksack. David shifted his gaze, saw his frown like a defect in the glass. He wiped the expression clean, pulling in a breath, deep and wide and blessedly silent. “Never mind it, okay?”

Rayburn eased forward half a step. “Tell me you’re still seeing the—“

“Aye,” he said, firm. “Once a week.”

A measure of uncertainty weighed down Rayburn’s eyelashes and mouth. Her gaze skittered from his own to a cab idling nearby. “Progress?”

David shrugged. “Fits and starts.” He considered the woman he’d called not an hour before. Took a moment to compare the jacket she wore to the skin of a plum. The button-up shirt beneath it to a sunlit patch of grass. While Rayburn appeared to forget the paper cup of tea she had in hand, its steam scented the air with crisp citrus. David swallowed, considered holding back the words after all, but—“I see her, still.”

“Who?”

“She’s not got a red case with her, and she’s not wearing that blue uniform she favored,” David said, “but she had a way with her hands. Squeezed them, you know, nails tight to palm.” His smile was faint. “Like a brawler. I wouldn’t mistake it.”

“David.” Rayburn crafted his name carefully, so fucking carefully. “You should be telling this to your counselor, not—“

“I have.” He engaged her stare, deliberately blank as it was. “Seeing her is a manifestation of my guilt. My grief.”

Rayburn slowly nodded. “All right, well, at least—“

“It’s fucking not it, though.” David glanced back at the fresh scene playing out against the window. A group of three women wearing laughter and red lipstick passed a single cigarette hand to hand. The tallest had a stain on her collar, dark as spilled coffee. He murmured, “My ghosts don’t come at me whole. Never have done.”

“What are you saying?”

David shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Try this one, then. Why did you call me?”

“I don’t know that either,” he said. “All I know is I’m seeing a dead woman, and somehow I’ve never been more certain of my sanity.”

Steadily, Rayburn took in all there was of him from hairline to chin, clocking the spot nicked by a razor. A slight slip of his hand that brought blood to the surface: his own, sure, and he’d have been fine had that been it, had he not recalled that unmistakeable color smeared across her throat. Distorting features he’d observed with his thumb, with kisses light as brushstrokes. A minute or less passed before tremors cracked open his chest, had taken hold of the muscles in both arms, and that had to’ve been it, the reason the razor hit the wall. The reason the fucking thing broke apart, the blade no longer contained by its casing.

“You think Julia Montague’s death was faked.”

His stomach clenched, but it was a matter of two words, five syllables, nothing David could counter with equal, damning violence. “It’s not out of the realm, is it.”

Sifting through the sparse crowd grazing at various points along the length of the footway, Rayburn finally, reluctantly, conceded, "I suppose not."

"I know it's a lot to ask you to look into it, but—"

"Are you—You're serious. That level of access," Rayburn's brow creased, "I can't just—"

"The insomnia is manageable. Plenty of experience there,” David broke in lowly, squaring off his shoulders in near-perfect mimicry of a confessional's privacy walls. "It's when I’m with my kids more than anything. I haven't been properly focused, not since—And all the counselor's got to say is that it'll take time." He looked to the side, looked off at a bit of nothing in the distance. "Spending your days in a war zone, or with a bomb strapped 'round your chest, it—You could maybe understand how I'm not content to wait. Not any longer, not if there's another option."

"If it's understanding you want, fine. I can give that to you, but anything else," Rayburn held up a pointed finger between them, "is without guarantee. Is _that_ understood?"

"Whatever you can do," David said, offering a slight smile, "will be appreciated.”

“I assume you followed her?”

David nodded shortly. “Tried to.”

Rayburn’s smirk showed over the rim of her cup, remembered after all. “The dead travel fast, that it?”

“A shame Stoker never did say _how_ fast.” David sunk a hand in one pocket, pressed the phone—with the myriad photos of shadows and empty spaces he’d captured on it—tight against his thigh. “She keeps her distance. Keeps things between us.”

“Could be it’s better that way.”

“Could be,” David agreed, easily enough, “but I’ll need to hear her say so.”

***

“She must care a great deal for you if she’s willing to risk her job.”

Deciding on his hands, the reflection of them in the mirror, Julia watched the towel he held go taut with sudden tension. The cloth was released as quickly and set aside, the movement no more than a ripple caught by the glass. He put his palms down on either side of the sink, and for a flicker of time, a second or two and no more, her thoughts shifted back to a wide hotel bed, to that night his arms had bracketed her head on the pillow. The pressure of his hand clasped to hers was a phantom pain she had willingly carried through recovery.

“Our line of work sees us taking a lot of risks,” David said, finally. “You’d know that better than most, ma’am.”

“She’s dogged, I’ll give her that.” Julia’s gaze touched on his wrist. Slid up his forearm until the sleeve’s folded cuff obscured the view. His shirt was the shade of wet sand. Its collar stiff and snug against his throat. “Is that why you went to her?”

“DS Rayburn is good.”

The muscle in his jaw shifted, but his eyes remained shuttered. When Julia had opened her own after the bombing, the hospital ceiling had been a rather drab white. The curtains had been closed, the sun and sky denied to her, and nowhere in the room could she find a blue so bright as to light it. “Is that in reference to a particular skill or her nature?”

David’s silence stretched on. For once, Julia was tempted to retract a question. 

“Why now, ma’am?”

“You’ve been looking for me, have you not?”

“Aye,” David said, “after you found me first.” He cocked his head. “Why?”

“You must know it was not my decision that kept the truth from y—“

“I can well imagine, but that’s not what I’m asking.”

Advancing into the public loo, Julia stopped where the air was thick with the honeyed scent of the soap David had used, where it was made a fraction warmer by his body’s unrelenting heat. She met his eyes in the mirror. “My choice.” Her fingers light on his back, sheltered in the slight hollow between shoulder blades, Julia softly said, “Turn around please, David.”

He did, if slowly, so very slowly, her fingertips shifting with him like a whisper spoken against his shoulder, biceps, his chest. Beneath the heel of her hand his heartbeat was as insistent as ever.

“That better, ma’am?”

Julia’s lips twitched. “Much.”

“Can you…Will you tell me what happened?”

She was nearer to him than she’d been in countless weeks and still she pressed closer. Listened to his breath hitch and hold. “Why won’t you say my name?”

David’s gaze lowered from her lips to her chin and the mark there hardened to a scar. “Why is it you want me to?”

Countless weeks, Julia thought again, drawing the pad of her index finger down the shallow cleft in his chin. Endless hours, and the sound of his voice was no longer a fading echo, no longer the remnants of some sort of waking dream. “Shall we remain at this impasse,” she said, “or make something of the time I can reasonably give us?”

“And how much would that be?”

“Ten. Less, if someone out there feels the need to answer nature’s call.”

It wasn’t that she’d forgotten the shape of his smile. That his generous mouth was merely the epicenter. The cut of his dimples and the lines that curved around them had ever proved equally distracting, had always left her in a state of near ruin.

“We’d better make some noise, then, so they’ll catch on and stay out.” David let go of the counter’s edge, his palm touching her hip, her elbow, like a stone skipping on water. Tracing one curl, he replaced the strands of hair behind her ear. “It’s not much time, is it?”

“Best I can do.” With his lips beneath hers, Julia murmured, “For now.”

***

“Have you had another dream?”

“Aye.” David briefly studied the silken scarf looped loosely around the counselor’s neck, realized it was the same she’d worn that first day. He was no more comfortable within the industrial gray walls of her office than he’d been then, in that initial hour, though he’d broken the habit of fisting his hands, of steadfastly staring at the coat rack in the corner. “They come more often now.”

“We’ll start with the latest one. What happened?”

“Same as all the rest.” It could’ve been spoken by someone else for the expanse of distance David heard in his own voice. “We had sex.” 

The counselor took a short note, put the silver-barreled pen down beside a pale yellow legal pad. “Was it good?”

“What?”

“Did you orgasm?”

“Did I—I’ve not been coming here to work out feelings of inadequacy caused by impotence, have I, ma’am.” Her eyebrow rose to mirror his, the small silence she let in the room broken by a huff he failed to keep back. “It was good.”

“But you weren’t satisfied.”

The counselor’s dark eyes didn’t budge from his face, had likely observed the degree his jaw had shifted, the rough bob of his Adam’s apple. “No.”

A nod. “Why?”

“I have questions, ma’am,” David said, after a beat. That sentence, he would swear he’d repeated it dozens of times to not only the counselor but to a multitude of officers, commanding and otherwise. “Questions she won’t answer.”

“Your unconscious mind cannot provide—“

“I know that.”

“But you continue to feel frustration—“

“She was lost on my watch.” David’s tone snapped with the same volatile charge that made a mess of his nerves; with the same untempered current that seized his hand and formed a fist despite his intention to remain open to the prescribed process. “And that not even an hour after implying she wanted a future with—For fuck’s sake, not so much time has passed to take all I feel along with it.”

***

“You’ve come this far.” Julia tipped her head up on the brace of David’s biceps, continued to circle a chosen freckle centered on his chest with the edge of one white-tipped nail. “To lose patience with the counselor now, David, is—”

“A step back, aye, I know it.” He sighed, raked his left hand through curls her own fingers had already displaced. “Can we—I’d rather not discuss it just now.”

“Just as well.” His skin beneath her lips was warm, firm, flushed a shade she’d seen in galleries and gardens, places of wild and refined beauty. It suited him. “We’ve only got a few minutes more.”

“Where do you go?” David asked, lifting his chin so her mouth could find the sanctuary it sought in the recess of his throat. “When you’re not with me?”

“Certainly not to the Death Star.”

“I’m serious, ma’am.”

“I know you are.” Julia lightly nipped the lobe of his ear, moved her palm down his abdomen with clear intent. “As am I, about this.”

David’s hand tightened on her hip; before her pulse could register potential danger, his hold softened. His thumb soothed the spot, sketching nondescript geometry across the area like people felt compelled to do through condensation on glass.

“And I appreciate how seriously you approach fucking me.”

Julia stilled her hand, pulled back to search his face. His expression betrayed nothing of consequence. Had she hoped to take her next cue from him, she was unable to see it in the dimmed light of his eyes. While their days of shared lifts and adjoining rooms might have been long behind them, the memory was there to be utilized. “We’re not handling this very well, are we?”

“It’s me. It’s my fault.” He glanced over at her. “Or something like that.”

“The world as either of us knew it changed drastically, but our particular pattern has remained much the same.” Pushing up on an elbow, Julia traced the peaks and curves of his mouth, attempted to chase off whatever it was that pulled it down. “Will you—I’d like to break it.”

David’s long lashes lowered and lifted. Had her attention not been wholly focused on him such a fleeting, flickering reaction would have happened unnoticed. “How?”

“I can’t stay in the shadows created for me much longer, can I? When I do step out, I would like your hand in mine.”

***

“There are plenty of rumors. Whispers,” Rayburn said. “Enough to make me think there’s something there, but…” She shrugged. “As deep as I’ve dug I haven’t turned up anything concrete.”

“That’s all right.” David sat back, the chair wobbling a bit before its uneven leg renewed its balance. The pint of beer on the table was down to a single swallow, the sunlight slanting through the window turning the liquid back to barley, that soft strain of gold. “The odds were long from the start.”

“If you’d let me clue in Sharma—“

“I shouldn’t have asked you to look,” David said, shaking his head, “never mind letting on to a DCI that I’ve got it in my head about some conspiracy— “

“Right, because the last time you were convinced of a conspiracy plot you were so far off the mark.” Rayburn leaned in, crossing arms on the table’s ledge. “He’ll believe you, David.”

The laugh that pronouncement provoked sounded hollow. “There’re days I don’t believe it myself.” 

“But you’re still seeing her.”

“I am.” David picked up the glass, looked into its depths before finishing off the beer. “She’s not been quite so careful as before.” Slipping into his arms and against his body in broad daylight. Rapping on his door before the sky had bled to full dark. “I dunno. It might be she wants to be seen. Or maybe it’s me, hoping she will be.”

***

Instead of a freshly laundered white, the shirt Julia had borrowed was the crystalline blue of ice layered over water, a color as cool as lace-like frost on glass. With the buttons left untouched, the material parted to reveal a swath of skin that, in reflection, made the windowpane appear fractured. Those series of odd, raised angles and abrupt indentations were written over her body as an indecipherable language, one David took to with a far greater skill and sense of diplomacy than she had managed.

“I could get used to the sight of you there.”

Chin level with shoulder, Julia glanced back at David. Reclining against a pillow, the sun hadn’t risen so high as to reach beyond the corner of the bed, but he hardly need be bathed in light for Julia to know he watched her as no one before him ever had. “I didn’t realize you were awake.”

“I’m not certain I am.” David lifted his hand from the spot she’d occupied beside him and held it out, his palm an open question. “Come back a moment before you’re well and truly gone.”

A sheer blue linen, the curtain fell into place as Julia stepped aside. She tried for a smile only to have it slip away like a spark before the flame fully took. “How often do dreams linger? Not very, I think.”

Her hand was brought to David’s lips; he brushed the knuckles with words like a kiss. “Usually they don’t make it so far as this, ma’am.”

Julia hesitated. “Will you be all right?”

“Aye.” David set a space for her between his legs, took her weight on his chest and her head on his shoulder, holding her as though his arms wouldn’t tire of the position—not for hours, possibly not for days. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well,” she said, and faltered, suddenly unwilling to deep dive into details that did not include the very definite and distinct shape David’s mouth took around particular phrases. The stitch of black on his left arm. How different lighting altered the shade of his hair, or the way he had of holding his side of a conversation solely with the mercurial movement of his eyebrows. “It will be over soon.”

“But it’s you and me. Here,” David said, “now. We should take advantage of being alone while we can.” His hand descending, easing over hieroglyphic scars and a field of goosebumps, Julia’s stomach tensed beneath the touch, trembled with the effort expended to remain still. His smile sifted the hair at her crown. “What would you like me to do?”

A laugh light as air before Julia managed to say, “You asked that as though you don’t already fucking know.”

“I only aim to please, ma’am, and it could be this,” David drew a single fingertip around her clit, applying the barest possible pressure, “isn’t what you’re wanting after all.”

Julia shifted, lifted her hips, entreating. “When did you become so maddening?”

“I think you wouldn’t have me any other way.”

“No,” Julia breathed, clenching David’s wrist at the first, shallow dip of his finger inside, “I—“

***

David jerked awake, a sheet gripped in one hand, the material wound around and clenching his wrist. His eyes shot towards the window, ricocheted to the empty corners of the room. He heard it again, then: a persistent knocking, an explosion of sound that shattered the morning, its silence and stillness. Blocking out the noise, ignoring its reverberation in his chest, David focused on the shiver—a wisp of cool outside air— toying with the curtain.

The undisturbed spot beside him was colder still, so cold his hand recoiled from it as he pushed up to stand.

Quickly crossing to the toilet, David briefly looked inside the room, backed away. Frowning, teeth scraping at his lip until blood teased his tongue, he stood at the kitchen’s threshold. Turned to the living room. There was his phone on one cushion, and slung over the back of the couch was the jacket he’d worn the previous evening over a button-down shirt in a light, chilled blue that was as good as wintertime.

That was it. 

That was fucking all.

His head brought around by another staccato series of knocks, he knew it was that much louder for his proximity to the door, he _knew_ it, but his hand still shook before it tightened. It was still a minute before he was able to move.

Yanking it open, David blinked to put off the revelation of sudden, blinding sunlight. “Julia?”

**Author's Note:**

> Feeling disoriented? If yes, well... :) Thank you for reading. Kudos and comments are _most_ welcome. 
> 
> (Fic title humbly borrowed from LP's "When I'm Over You.")


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